What might it be like to be a member of a poor family living in Delhi that has emigrated to America? What job might your father do there? Where might you live? Family Life, the second widely acclaimed novel from the Indian-American writer Akhil Sharma, answers these questions. Look, every page seems to say: this is our apartment; this is what we eat. Listen, it says, how different it is here. And so we look and learn, while, in simple, straightforward prose, Family Life lays out a story of unbearable loss and estrangement. For not only is this novel about leaving a homeland for a new world in which nothing is like home, it is about another kind of migration altogether, which takes a family from everyday reality into a dark, secret place where grief has enclosed them.
"My father has a glum nature," the book begins. "He's been retired for a few years, and he doesn't speak much. He can spend whole days without saying anything to my mother. If he is left to himself, though, he begins brooding." So we are alerted from the start that Sharma is effecting a translation, of sorts – from a wide and complex psychology into simple, accessible description – turning his novel about loneliness and despair into one that may even nearly make us laugh. "Recently," that opening paragraph continues, "he told me that I had always been selfish, that when I was a baby, I would start to cry as soon as he turned on the TV … When he said this, I began tickling him … 'Who's the sad baby?' I said. 'Who's the baby that cries all the time?'"
Written from the point of view of Ajay, arriving in New York after a childhood spent in Delhi, and learning to grow up as an American boy in Queens – "We even discussed what part of a dog a hot dog must be made of ", and so on – there is a clear trajectory, as with so many other stories of emigration, from the strange to the familiar, where the customs of old must make way for new manners. "I had never seen hot water coming from a tap before. In India, during winter, my mother used to get up early to heat pots of water on the stove so we could bathe … During the coming days, the wealth of America kept astonishing me. The television had programming from morning till night. In our shiny brass mailbox in the lobby, we received ads on coloured paper. The sliding glass doors of our apartment building would open when we approached."
This somewhat familiar narrative pattern is broken open, though, when Ajay's elder brother Birju, destined for great things, hits his head on the side of a swimming pool and is permanently brain damaged. Ajay, then, is expected to grow up and achieve greatness in his stead. His guilt at being the surviving brother, massive and undeclared, is the emotional and literary centre of Sharma's project, and charges his novel with an awful particularity that lifts it beyond other novels about making a home in the west. Yet the enormity of the subject seems barely registered. Instead of getting anything of Ajay's experience that might read as personal and troubled, we have this flattened-out version of his feelings that, though it may hint at emotion, shows none of it. All is closed down:
"A year had gone by since Birju's accident. My father began shaving him. The first time he did this was one afternoon. My mother and I stood and watched as he put shaving cream on Birju's cheeks … Birju lay there calmly as my father lathered him. I thought of how Birju had wanted to be a doctor. It seemed unfair that something like this could happen and the world go on."
The unspoken story is the telling one, of course, and reaches its troubling climax on the very last pages of the novel. As the family become more and more Americanised, as Ajay fulfils his brother's promise – growing up instead of him to achieve the grades that will get him the job that will take him all over the world to send the kind of money home to his parents they can't begin to spend – so, more and more, we come to see how complete is his own destruction. Sharma's story is a deeply American one in the way it takes a poor boy and makes him rich, valourising the wonders of the material world and giving his hero's life a fairytale gloss: "Once I got into Princeton, people phoned and asked my mother to bring me to their homes so their children could see me." "After I graduated, I became an investment banker"; "In my first year as vice president, I made seven hundred thousand dollars." But it is American, too, in showing so clearly the cracks that underlie that same story, as Ajay's father falls deeper and deeper into alcoholism and TV, and his mother retreats into silence behind a suburban facade.
My Take On This Book
I put myself in little Ajay's shoes when he first came to America. It must be tough. Even being in a new kid in a new school in your homeland is tough. Have experienced it myself a few times in my primary school years. Children can be cruel and teachers are not that helpful with a newcomer. In a foreign land the challenges can multiply four or five times, I believe. It is hard on Ajay. Before his brother's accident he is probably much happier as the burden of expectation does not fall on his shoulder yet. I think, if you are in foreign land, especially in America, as a foreigner, you are expected to do well, you are expected to prove yourself against all odds. Isn't that what the American dream is all about?
After Birju's accident, many things happen to the family. It culminated in the father falling deeper and deeper into alcoholism and the mother being shunned by the local Indian community. Ajay at times resorted to daydreaming, speaking with God, in order to release stress of the whole situation. Ajay in the end is successful. But at what price?
After Birju's accident, many things happen to the family. It culminated in the father falling deeper and deeper into alcoholism and the mother being shunned by the local Indian community. Ajay at times resorted to daydreaming, speaking with God, in order to release stress of the whole situation. Ajay in the end is successful. But at what price?
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